BlackBerry Fights Back With New Tablet, Lower Smartphone Prices

For a while there, it looked like BlackBerry would be left behind, as Apple, HP, Samsung and others raced ahead with their tablet computers. But, hoping perhaps to emulate the tortoise in its fabled contest with the hare, BlackBerry parent Research in Motion (RIM) is showing signs of, well, motion, rolling out a new tablet computer and lower prices on its Torch smartphone.

RIM is introducing its own tablet computer, the BlackBerry PlayBook and pricing it at less than $500, apparently trying to undercut Apple's iPad. RIM is also touting the PlayBook's ability to handle Flash, the technology that drives much of the video content on the Internet.

The iPad doesn't run Adobe Systems' Flash, which for various reasons doesn't play nicely with Apple products. This often leaves iPad users staring at a blank screen instead of the video clip they had hoped to see.

Business users, in particular, have little patience for long-winded technical arguments about why Steve Jobs and his acolytes don't like Flash and many have spurned the iPad for that reason alone. (Shocking disclosure: I dumped my iPad after a month or two, partly because of its lack of Flash and partly because of its rather unwieldly size, returning happily to a Kindle and an HTC Droid-driven smartphone).

Carrying a Torch

Meanwhile, AT&T is hoping to boost sales of RIM's BlackBerry Torch smartphone, slashing its price in half, to just $99.99. A touchscreen phone with a slide-out Qwerty keyboard, the Torch was introduced last August at $199.99 with a two-year contract, about the same price as an iPhone.

An AT&T spokeswoman said the lower price was a holiday special and said it wasn't unusual to cut prices in anticipation of holiday shopping.

BlackBerry, playing to its strength among business users, is promoting the PlayBook as an "enterprise-ready" device, emphasizing its standard configuration of a 1 GHz dual-core processor coupled with 1 GM of RAM and full symmetric multi-processing, said to deliver more robust multitasking than the iPad.

For video-conferencing addicts, the PlayBook includes a front-facing camera as well as a rear-facing camera for taking traditional snapshots.

Oh, by the way, the PlayBook not only supports Flash, it also comes with built-in support for HTML5, the latest Web standard which supports video and multimedia natively, thus supplying some redundancy that's lacking in the iPad.